I absolutely agree here, but really it's just human racism that's gone in Star Trek. Plenty of characters are casually racist towards other species, including Jonathan Archer, Leonard McCoy, and Miles O'Brien. Thus racism hasn't really been solved, it's just been projected further outward.
That's a good point, and it suggests that the creative minds behind Trek, particularly the various revivals, have never been engaged in thinking through what is the
substance of racism and bigotry. They don't really recognize bigotry when they see it, except in the most conventionally defined forms.
Roddenberry certainly had a liberal social consciousness for a man of his background in his day. There's no question of that. But in conception and design
Star Trek drew much of its format and storytelling approach from previous popular cultural representations of historical eras and movements that were steeped in racism: 19th century European colonialism and the westward expansion of European settlements in North America. Spock himself was, conceptually, an avatar familiar from American western movies, pulp stories and TV; the "half-breed" adopted into the dominant group. Consequentially he and his culture were portrayed with the exoticism and stereotyping that were accepted in those kinds of stories. Both the broad-brush assignment of peculiar psychological quirks as intrinsic to his people and civilization and the casual mockery and disrespect of both, notably on the part of one of the show's most sympathetic and supposedly humane characters, McCoy, set the pattern for the treatment of "non-human" people in the franchise ever since. Far from being progressive, present-day
Trek is atavistic with respect to these elements.
So, to use a specific example from the current run: characters identified as human and identified as members of groups that moral people now recognize as marginalized and suppressed, like Burnham or Stamets, are well and respectfully portrayed, as everyone should be. But when it's necessary for the writers to find a shorthand way to make the antagonistic aliens unsympathetic and deserving of emotionally motivated, violent deaths? Why, they're cannibals.* No one creating this feels the need to even think that through.**
When created,
Star Trek was an admirable, well-motivated effort to take a moral stand in support of equality and human rights. I doubt that anyone - around here, anyway - questions the high-minded intentions of the producers and writers. But it embodied the myopia of its time then and has just not evolved very much in this regard over the decades and as a result is glaringly narrowminded and backward in important respects now. It falls back on lazy storytelling cliches and tropes without much self-examination.
*Klingons eating humans and humans eating Kelpians are ethically cannibals, sorry. Deal with it.
**This was GR's first take on the Ferengi when he invented them with the intention that they would be the new "big bad" on TNG, as well. Not consciously racist I'm sure, but not by happenstance either IMO. The assignment of this defined-as-repulsive characteristic to the Other comes most directly out of colonialism.
